More evidence that evilution is a vast, world-wide conspiracy. Revealing the History of Sheep Domestication Using Retrovirus Integrations Scientists from all over the world (literally, Portugal to Pakistan, Italy to Iceland, Tanzania to Texas) have used the random insertion of endogenous retroviruses, specifically, Jaagsiekte sheep retrovirus, to determine the evolutionary history of sheepies: enJSRVs can…

I never had allergies until I moved to Oklahoma. Evidently, when the wind comes sweeping down the plain at +45 mph, its carrying billions and billions of grains of cedar pollen. So even though I grew up in a damn forest, Im now allergic to ‘trees’. *bonus* Arnie is allergic to trees AND grass. A…

So, like, last weekend the Oklahoma GOP had their convention in Tulsa. They put together their party platform. … It is batshit insane. Like… *silence*… like just print this off (pdf), close your eyes, point at a random sentence and read it. There is a 100% chance that the sentence you point at is batshit…

That was close. HB 1326, aka ‘Politicians against baby murder and for hot pancakes’ was vetoed by Gov. Henry last night. This morning the House voted to override the veto 68-26… But the override only got 26 votes in the Senate. They needed 32. So us evil Nazi scientists can officially “KILL TEH BAAAAABBYS!” in…

Poor Brad Henry. Oklahomas Democratic governor. Fairly rational dude, always willing to go to bat for the scientific community in this state. Tonight he is vetoing the ‘UR KILLIN TEH BABBYS!’ bill, which would make stem-cell research illegal in Oklahoma. Unfortunately, the House/Senate have the votes to override his veto, effectively making OK scientists who…

T. Boone Pickens. Never heard of the guy till I moved to OK. Some gazillionare that donates a shitload of money to Oklahoma State in Stillwater. Now while Pickens seems kinda like a cliche Republican (oil man, Swift Boat contributor, hoarding water), evidently his wife is a PETA nutbar. Oh certainly shes done ‘good’ things–…

While Ive mentioned the connection between endogenous retroviruses and Multiple Sclerosis on teh blag before, I realized Ive never written a post on this topic. Fortunately I just read an interesting paper thats provided me with a good opportunity to do just that: Analysis of transcribed human endogenous retrovirus W env loci clarifies the origin…

Last year I wrote about a cool paper, arguing for the creation of a new polio vaccine. Briefly, polio is an RNA virus, thus has an error-prone RNA-RNA polymerase, thus acts like a quasispecies like HIV-1. Now, a live attenuated polio vaccine is the ‘best’ because you activate lots of branches of your immune system,…